


implode

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Guns, M/M, Not Shippy, Object Sexuality, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-16
Updated: 2013-03-16
Packaged: 2017-12-05 10:33:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/722066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, what you want is bad for everyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	implode

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dogtier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogtier/gifts).



What could be better?

They are beautiful when he takes them apart to clean them, laid open on the table, but Jake believes they are most appealing when in the act of firing.  His handguns, that is.    
  
If you’ve never thought violence had its own beauty - to yourself, while marathoning action movies and watching choreographed fight scenes with an avid interest - it’s not easy to explain the sexual appeal.  Jake himself finds it a damned pernicious thing, the burning metal and the leaping burn of arousal in his body, doubling up on him in a queer loop.  As soon as he’s big enough to take the recoil he gleefully wastes shot - fires his Berettas in rapid succession at solid concrete, watching it chip and shatter, until the cylinders are empty.  He holds the barrels in his hands and lets his palms get almost-burnt, stroking them like they could enjoy it, with possessive tenderness.    
  
It doesn’t occur to him that he’s miming masturbation, not right off the bat.  Jake English is a creature to act on instinct, spur-of-the-moment.    
  
When the thought does eventually occur to him - probably a crude joke of Strider’s, echoing around his skull and finally blundering into something - he stops for a while, making a conscious effort to Not Do the thing he’s fallen into doing out of habit.    
  
This effort is dutifully adhered to for a week and then quickly abandoned.  Guns are sexy, is all he can say to defend himself - not that anyone's asking.  Look what they can do.  The noise they make, the destruction they unleash, the thrumming heat almost like a body to the touch.  The smell of metal and acrid gunpowder, the reek of power.  
  
One sticky summer afternoon after having a tooth or two knocked wobbly by Brobot, Jake finds he’s sprawled on the torn grass, gripping a gun in one hand and lazily tugging himself to orgasm.  He thinks about the terrified split-second before the metal fists hit his flesh - the roar of anticipation and the moment of impact.  He imagines he’s the Beretta, that the firepower he can control is a part of his body.    
  
Once he comes, successfully hitting a nearby fern and making it wobble a bit, he laughs at himself for ten minutes, for being so young and stupid and easily aroused.  Such folly, such faults the flesh is heir to.  
  
The next six times he indulges himself to the thought of guns firing - twice outdoors, thrice in the dark secrecy of his bedroom, once in the shower - he doesn’t laugh at all.  But it’s still only a habit.  Nothing too freakish.  These things wear off, surely.  Over time.  
  
And life more or less proceeds as usual, until he marathons Pirates of the Caribbean, one weekend, and gets hooked on the idea of firing a cannon, and for three nights he can’t stop thinking about it, and maybe he’s not too keen on wanting to.  
  
TT:  It’s not that big a deal.  
GT: i dont think you grasp the severity of the situation here mister strider!!!!!  
GT:  ive become a bonafide pervert!  Im a menace to society at large, buckaroo, theyll clap me in irons for it sooner or later and theyll have every right to it  
TT:  You live alone on a fucking island, Jake.  
TT:  Just stop jacking off for a week or two, you’ll go back to normal.  
GT: … really?  
GT: i mean would that work  
TT:  It’s not like I haven’t seen some really weird porn  
TT:  Not to say I like.  Explicitly look for weird porn.  I mean, sure, from time to time, if I’m really fucking bored, I’ll leave a little trail of incriminating search terms and click on links that shouldn’t be clicked  
TT:  But it’s not that hard to kick the habit, you know?  
GT:  well.  
GT:  well!!!!  
GT:  thank you as usual Dirk youve been helpful and a touch discconcerting  
TT:  Haha.  Yeah.  No problem. I mean.  What are friends for.  
GT:  hahaha yes!    
GT:  best of friends.  
  
Jake makes a mental note to be particularly wary of clicking on any hyperlinks from his best chum, for the foreseeable future, and gamely sets out to stop masturbating altogether for a month.  
  
He can’t, though.    
  
It’s too difficult to resist, and the images and sensations - as he imagines them - slip in without his intent during his private moments.  He finds that it’s like trying to carry water in a sieve.  Eventually, despite his initial sobriety in this endeavor, he wakes up with a painfully hard bit of morning wood, says _bugger it for a lark_ , and grabs his pistol off the nightstand.  
  
(In retrospect, perhaps he should have consigned his handguns to their locker for the duration of this attempt at abstinence, and not kept them right by the bed, but this was never a habit he wholly wanted to kick.)  
  
Surely it isn’t too depraved.    
  
Consider the sheer power of the cannon - the iron balls splintering the sides of ships thicker than whole trees, the recoil severing the hands and sometimes heads of those too slow to dodge it, the monstrous appetite of the guns.  Like trying to wrestle an earthquake, or grapple with electricity: the chance to point that power at something, the terror that it’ll aim itself at you.  
  
A bolt of force that he wants to ride, like wanting to live through a lightning strike.  The gripping force of imagining all that energy - Beretta against his dick, hot and hard as he hyperventilates.  The percussive force of massive detonations.  
  
It gets ridiculous when he finds himself furiously jerking off to Star Wars - not the mind-numbingly hot reboot, the older movies, with fight scenes barely more complicated than a firecracker detonated in front of a starry bedsheet.  He’s been thoroughly seduced by the simple _idea_ of blowing up something planet-sized - the shittiness of the visuals has no dampening effect on English Jr.  
  
In a weird way it offers him a sense of relief - there’s a growing fear in the pit of his navel, when he stops to think uneasily about what he’s doing.  Surely he wouldn’t hurt anyone in real life.  Surely he wouldn’t be aroused if, say, any of his friends were injured or shot.  (Fucking hell - the bullet ripping through the flesh - he bites his lip and whines and tries not to imagine it anymore.)  As long as he focuses on abstract fantasies that can’t really happen - who the hell could blow up a universe? - he doesn’t have to worry.  Even if monster-slaying causes him to sport a semi.  It doesn't _mean_ anything.

He stops bringing it up with Dirk out of a strange, private humiliation - _still a pervert, mate, couldn’t stay clean after all_ \- and never mentions it to Roxy or Jane.  Nonetheless, Jake can’t shake the feeling that Strider remembers, somehow.    
  
Because the fellow remembers absolutely everything, files everything Jake has ever said into a mental library catalogue, and there’s no way Dirk would forget.  Not when he seems so interested in everything to do with Jake.  
  
It’s not something Jake consciously thinks about all the time - _cheerio, lad, you’ve got a textbook fetish for guns and your best friend knows all about it!_  The knowledge that Dirk knows, and that Dirk probably also knows that Jake knows that he knows, and possibly further recursive loops of knowingness, hovers like a nascent cloud in the back of Jake’s mind.  It’s a pretty big deal, he supposes, and Brobot is a more and more suspicious choice of present the more Jake considers - but there’s no need to fret overmuch.  Is there?  Because none of these weird little traits and hushed secrets between friends will ever have any bearing on Jake’s life.  He is, as Dirk said, a teenager alone on an island.  

He still assumes he might grow out of it.  Refuses to flirt with the notion that he might never.  
  
Then SBURB begins, and this optimistic assumption - like most things - goes straight to hell.

* * *

A few discoveries:

Kissing Dirk’s severed head was, largely, disgusting.  
  
But it remains one of the coolest, cinematically perfect things he’s ever done.

And in real life Jake finds that Dirk is a tightlipped, stoic, emotionally unavailable wall with a penchant for mumbling.

But he's got a warm-blooded body like chiseled granite, unspeakably sweet moves, and comports himself more or less like an action hero out of a movie.  Dirk's planet is a hellhole; it makes him look good, as he navigates it with obnoxious ease.

And - to his own considerable dismay - Jake discovers that it really _is_ ridiculously hot when Dirk gets roughed up.  He doubts a good person - a good friend - would think that way, seeing someone they care a great deal about get bruised and bloody, but maybe neither of them are very good people. He's starting to suspect they're both shallow jerks.  Dirk goes out of his way to pick gruelling battles with the almost-unkillable imps, show off, make his competence and skill really hard for Jake to ignore.  (Roxy calls this 'obvious', and won't explain.) Jake finds himself showing off purely to match him.

The game dropped them into a setting where the violence they can wreak on their surroundings is limited in scope only by their imaginations and their firepower. Dirk seems to relish it.  He flies around on his rocketboard and uses his shitty katana to cut buildings in half.

Just look what he can _do_ , Jake finds himself thinking, in a possessive admiring way.  Look at what Dirk can destroy, if you point him at something and tell him to go.  The smell of his body's exertion, blood and grime.  The way his muscles cordon over his bones and gleam with sweat.  The inhuman look of his gas mask - senseless, anonymous violence - the way it filters his voice to something alien and harsh.  The thrill that hits him visibly when an imp finally dies, and the thrill hits Jake when he watches Dirk reach satisfaction.  ( _Maybe you could talk to him about it,_ Roxy says, gesturing with her rifle.  Jake laughs and asks her  _About what?_ as his eyes trace the path the muzzle trails through the air.)

It does not occur to Jake immediately that he might want to have sex with Dirk - fresh off the battlefield, gorey and vibrating with adrenaline tension, dripping, like a sword pulled out from underwater.  Jake will always prefer guns but when Dirk is such a filthy mess he thinks he might like to shove him down on the roof, shove Dirk inside him, fuck around with him the same way he fucks with his guns, only it's better because Dirk is a person, not  _really_ an instrument for murder, and so Jake feels like less of a freak for it.  _Can I - of course - are you sure? - sure._ What a bang-up solution to a persistent problem. 

"Yeah," is all Dirk says, nodding his head curtly, when Jake asks him - _would you care to be my -_?  Cuts him off before he can fumble for an embarrassing - potentially incriminating - noun.  Lover?  Paramour?  Boyfriend?  Right hand?  Excuse?  Dirk is almost wholly silent during the eventual sex, and Jake doesn't mind.  Shuts his eyes and thinks about things he won't ask for, such as: _would you use my guns to -?_ and _would you let me handle your sword?_   The real one, not the euphemism.  It isn't proper to ask for so much, to bend Dirk further away from normal.  

There are things that simply don't occur to Jake, such as: how long and to what extent Dirk has re-shaped his identity and personality to anticipate Jake's desires.  What level of insecurity - what level of reciprocated want - might exist beneath the cool exterior.  Whether the stoicism is there because Dirk is stoic, or because he thinks Jake wants him to be.  Jake is a simple, straightforward person.  He is not contemplative. 

He is at his most attractive in the act of killing, but Dirk is beautiful when Jake lays him open and takes him apart, gripping his hardness and reveling: if not in pleasure, to be with Dirk like this, then in the raw power he's tamed, without knowing how or why.

It does make Jake uncomfortable, when Dirk sometimes falters, goes soft and vulnerable.  Asks insane questions like, "Do you care about me?" and "Do you want me at all?"

"Of course," Jake says, without hesitation - annoyed that his, his _boyfriend_ , he supposes is the correct verbiage, would even ask.  The lunacy of the question erodes Jake's crumbling shield of deliberate ignorance.  Why would Dirk ask that unless - and stop there, it's not a good train of thought.  They are in a relationship, they are together, it's normal and they are just fine.

Jake hasn't masturbated with his guns for a few whole weeks, even if he's wanted to.  And on top of being both attractive and a competent killer, Dirk has been his best chum for years and years.  This whole monogamous relationship idea isn't half bad, even if if makes his trigger fingers itch from time to time - even if the idea of sex with his guns is enough to make him salivate, and sex with Dirk takes some mental effort. There's a clear emotional payoff, at least on Dirk's end of things, at least hypothetically; and a relationship with a human being was always a little offputting, but Dirk is the most robotic person Jake has ever known. 

So of course he wants Dirk.  Who - being so foolish and young and heedless - could ask for more? Jake asks himself, and tries not to contemplate the horror of living like this forever.  Surely if they keep up this relationship nonsense for long enough Jake will feel something besides vaguely hungry and bored, surely this isn't taking advantage, surely this want is born from sincere attachment.  Jake could see himself wanting Dirk for years and years.

Indefinitely, perhaps.

(As long as Dirk remains the most dangerous thing around.)


End file.
